How to run B-to-B online promotion

Business-to-business: It’s not the sexiest segment of the New Economy. And true to its nature, B-to-Bs’ advertising strategies are a lot more pedestrian than those of its wild-and-woolly consumer-oriented e-commerce cousins. Business-to-consumer dot-coms debate whether to work with one or multiple agencies to create a big brand boom. But the main question for business-to-business dot-coms is rather more mundane. It revolves around when and how their ad campaigns should introduce targeted, narrower messages and when to launch broad, branding themes.

B-to-B dot-coms generally need to explain their products to customers more extensively than do consumer dot-coms. At the same time, they need to create broad, accessible messages. This makes their marketing job all the more difficult since they’re on the same tight time frames as consumer-based businesses. B-to-B advertisers need to create tactical messages to attract new customers, but they also need to build brand.

Consider Agillion. Steve Papermaster, co-founder and CEO of the Austin, Texas-based company, is quick to emphasize that Agillion’s Super Bowl spot last January wasn’t a budget-blowing act of hubris for his year-old startup. For one, Agillion, which offers inexpensive Web-based customer-relationship management (CRM) systems to small and midsize companies, is among the growing ranks of B-to-B enterprises that have ad budgets big enough in Agillion’s case, $20 million to afford a dash of consumer-style marketing.

To that end – and months before Agillion ran the Super Bowl ad that kicked off this year’s campaign – the company hired an ad agency that could address both the highly targeted and the broader marketing initiatives Agillion planned to introduce. “I think hiring multiple agencies can be a mistake for an early-stage company,” says Papermaster.

The Super Bowl spot was actually an end run for Agillion’s agency, Austin-based GSD&M Advertising. First and foremost, GSD&M helped Agillion market its service during 1999 on a local level, while the company’s service was still in “preview version.” The campaign centered around local radio, print, and TV spots, which attracted a first wave of customers. This, in essence, was Agillion’s round of first-stage tactical advertising.

Papermaster notes, though, that the size of his target audience was a key factor in his hiring GSD&M. The agency has worked with such large clients as the U.S. Olympic Committee and Southwestern Bell, and Papermaster felt Agillion would need a thin layer of consumer advertising in the mix. “I would tell a vice president of marketing at any business-to-business dot-com that if the customer base is smallish in the thousands or tens of thousands then reject the idea of using a mass consumer strategy,” Papermaster says.